The Bright Side of Marxist Purity Tribunals
A young man who survived the highly politicized Parkland high school shooting in 2018, but who did not allow the progressive elite to exploit him as part of their anti-gun propaganda campaign (à la David Hogg), has had his acceptance to Harvard University rescinded because once, when he was sixteen years old, he used vulgar and tasteless language in an online chat with friends.
Of course, this should come as no surprise to anyone, as we now live in The Age of Neo-Maoist Public Shaming. China herself has developed this model into a formal system of moral score-keeping, with which they can now use digital data to monitor the daily activity of all Chinese, and bring specific punishments to bear on any individual deemed to have offended against Communist Party orthodoxy in his private life — which is to say the Chinese have officially eliminated private life. The less advanced portion of the progressive world (i.e., the world still a few years behind China in totalitarian inhumanity), lacking the formal state-run version of this system, is forced, for the time being, to do it the old-fashioned way, namely through neighborhood spies. This time around, however, thanks to the internet, the neighborhood is the whole world, and the spies are literally anyone who ever encountered you, in any context, at any point in your entire life.
The essence of the concept of public shaming, however, remains what it was during the heyday of China’s Cultural Revolution: You are permanently on notice that you are, in all your endeavors, at the mercy of anything you ever did, anything you ever said, and everyone with whom you ever interacted in any way, at any time, under any circumstances. In practice, this means that the price of standing apart from others, or disagreeing in any way with the current political orthodoxy, no longer merely entails facing disapproval or resistance from the majority of your peers; rather, it triggers a public process of rifling through the entire index of your life for anything, however unrelated or ancient, that may be used to destroy your name and reputation in the present. Your whole complex existence may in this way be sucked at any moment through any tiny hole in your life’s fabric, thereby reducing everything you are, have been, or will be, to one mistake, one weakness, one folly, or even a mere allegation of such a thing, whether that allegation pertains to something that happened thirty years ago, something that happened when you were a child, or something that happened within the confines of a private conversation with intimates.
And don’t fool yourself: Something will be found, if and when the enforcers of orthodoxy deem it necessary. That is never in doubt. The traditional canard the apologists for “benevolent” or “soft” tyranny have always held up to excuse excessively intrusive government — “If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear” — is now as obsolete as it is offensive. For everyone, on today’s standards, has “done something wrong,” partly because the evils that may be cited against you today need have no relation whatsoever to the matter at hand in any given situation, and partly because truth, context, and proportion are no longer factors to be taken into account. You are guilty because you are accused, and you are open to accusation merely for living in a way that anyone in your neighborhood (and you remember what that means) regards as grounds for convening a Marxist purity tribunal against you.
But why focus on the negative? A universal circular firing squad of social justice warriors will eventually meet its obvious and irreversible fate. If it brings a few billion innocents down with it, well, perhaps that’s just the price a civilization must pay for its sins. Call that modernity’s real purification.
In this spirit of happy resignation, then, let’s take a moment to accentuate the positive, shall we?
Harvard University has rescinded its admission offer to one young man on Marxist tribunal premises. Great! On its face, I immediately see at least three reasons to celebrate and encourage such a decision with complete and unmitigated enthusiasm.
Reason 1:
It will result in at least one snotty little Harvard graduate fewer roaming like a virus amid the general population, spouting his pompous inanities — or to be more precise, spouting the same inanities as everyone else, but spouting them with the added annoyance of that self-important air and that nasal, artificially-elevated vocal pitch of one self-consciously trying to make his bromides sound original and deeply reasoned.
Reason 2:
If Harvard denied admission to everyone who, at sixteen, did or said something that fell outside the boundaries of moral purity, let alone Marxist political correctness, the school would soon have about twenty students, most of them compliant minions of sub-moron intelligence. Harvard would have effectively purged itself right out of existence and social relevance. I say, “Go get ’em, morality czars!”
Reason 3:
A world in which no one graduated from Harvard University would be a measurably, tangibly better world, plain and simple. The progressive, Prussian-inspired hierarchical academic filtration system, which was never anything but a way of purifying, caging, and then rewarding with bananas and power a safe, moldable, and predictable societal elite — i.e., of predetermining the developmental trajectory of America by funneling the Mind of Man through the muck of Crowd Think (cardigan brigade) — would suffer a mortal wound, the loveliest byproduct of which would be a more dynamic, daring, varied, individualistic, and free-flowing intellectual and political life.
Talk about creative destruction! Go Harvard, beat Yale (on the road to oblivion)!